Woman pretended her family cut her off for being Republican to raise money

By Theresa Braine

Nov 05, 2018 | 6:58 PM

Like the President she purported to support, Quran tweeted that she was not going to “hide any longer” as a Republican and would no longer be cowed by the left. (Carolyn Kaster / AP)

Talk about fake news.

A young woman who raised $200 in GOP sympathy after falsely reporting in a GoFundMe campaign that her parents had cut her off for supporting the Republican Party has been outed as a fraud.

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The money that Chicago college student known as “Quran” raised from her viral post complete with fake text-message screenshots supposedly from her mother has been returned to the donors, according to the woman.

Like the President she purported to support, Quran tweeted that she was not going to “hide any longer” as a Republican and would no longer be cowed by the left.

“The left has made us feel as if us black republicans [sic] should hide!!” she wrote on Oct. 27. “But not anymore!!”

The tweet, which captioned a selfie in which Quran sported a bucket MAGA hat, was rounded out with hashtags “BlacksForTrump, #maga and #WalkAway, the campaign trying to get Democrats to defect. It quickly earned 8,379 retweets and 23,744 likes.

Then she took it up a notch, saying, “Thank you all so much for your overwhelming support. After seeing this tweet my parents cut me off and refuse to pay my university tuition,” she wrote.

“So if you can find it in your hearts to help this young, black republican pay for school it would be appreciated.”

She punctuated that one with an American flag icon and a link to a GoFundMe page, since deleted.

At first she got lots of replies commending her courage and welcoming her to “the sane side.”

It took just a few hours for Quran, whose Twitter handle is Reformed Republican, to admit she had made it all up, especially the support. She told New York magazine that she had refunded the money — one donation of $50 and two for $20 — and shut down the campaign.

GoFundMe also deleted her account.

While she didn’t pull in money, she did realize one of her goals, she told New York magazine, as the Twitter responses exposed the gullibility inherent in Republicans’ deep desire for minority support.

“There are the people who support me for being a black Trump supporter, there are the people who are asking me why,” she told the magazine. “And then there’s the other people who saw obviously it was a troll.”